Australian Music Industry Grows

ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) announced that growth in the Australian recorded music industry last year was the highest since 1996.

ARIA reported a 10.5% increase in the value of the Australian recorded music industry for 2017, representing an increase in the value of the industry to $391 million. ARIA says that most of the growth was driven by streaming music services, with 2017 being the first year that revenue from music streaming services (at $213 million) accounted for over half (54%) of the overall market. ‘This is a remarkable performance given the revenue from this segment of the market was negligible just five years ago,’ said Denis Handlin, of ARIA.

Handlin said that despite the dominance of streaming, physical formats continue to play a vital part of the music business, accounting for 25% of the overall market and that vinyl album sales increased for the seventh consecutive year, and in 2017 by 19 per cent.

ARIA CEO, Dan Rosen, said: ‘The return to growth of the Australian recording industry is a wonderful story of resilience, hard work and innovation. Music fans today can access their favourite artists across a multitude of formats from vinyl to streaming services on their phones and smart speakers.’

Spain’s Digibit has introduced its Aria high-end music server system, which claims to be the only music server in the market that supports an unlimited number of extended metadata fields for any music genre.

British loudspeaker manufacturer Wilson Benesch, which this year celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, has released the first model in its new ‘Precision Series’ loudspeaker line, the Wilson Benesch P3.0.